Glass Book_: SMITHSONIAN DEPOSIT ^^f XI-XII THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF THE INDIAN TRADE IN WISCONSIN "The history of commerce"is the history of the intercommunica- tion of peoples." — Montesquieu. JOHNS HOPKINS HNIVERSITy STDDIES IN Historical and Political Science HERBERT B. ADAMS, Editor History is past Politics aud Politics present History. — Freeman NINTH SERIES XI-XII The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin A Study of the Trading Post as an Institution J LI 6a By FREDERICK J.TURNER, Ph. ». <^ V^'^>'\ Professor of HiHory, UniversUy of Wisconsin 11! \0 •, .-» ' baltimore The Johns Hopkins Press PUBLISHED MONTHLY A'oven»ber aud December, 1891 / ^ ,It2 h COPYKIGHT, 1891, BY N. MURRAY. ISAAC FKIEDENWALD CO., PRINTERS, BAIiTIMOBE. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE. I. Introduction " II. Primitive Inter-Tkibal Trade 10 III. Place of the Indian Trade in the Settlement ok America 1 i 1. Early Trade along the Atlantic Coast 11 2. In New England 12 3. In the Middle Region 13 4. In the South 16 5. In the Far West IS IV. The River and Lake Systems of the Northwest 19 V. Wisconsin Indians 22 VI. Periods of the AVisconsin Indian Trade 25 VII. French Exploration in Wisconsin 26 VIII. French Posts in Wisconsin 33 IX. The Fox Wars 34 X. French Settlement in Wisconsin 38 XI. The Traders' Struggle to Retain their Trade 40 XII. The English and the Northwest. Influence of the Indian Trade on Diplomacy 42 XIII. The Northwest Company 51 XIV. American Influences 51 XV. Government Trading Houses 58 XVI. AViscoNSiN Trade in 1820 61 XVII. Effects of the Trading Post 6" THE CHARACTEK AND INFLUENCE OF THE INDIAN TRADE IN WISCONSIN. Introduction/ The trading post is an old and influential institution. Established in the midst of an undeveloped society by a more advanced people, it is a center not only of new economic influences, but also of all the transforming forces that accom- pany the intercourse of a higher with a lower civilization. The Phoenicians developed the institution into a great historic agency. Closely associated with piracy at first, their commerce gradually freed itself from this and spread throughout the Mediterranean lands. A passage in the Odyssey (Book XV.) enables us to trace the genesis of the Phoenician trading post : " Thither came the Phoenicians, mariners renowned, greedy merchant-men with countless trinkets in a black ship They abode among us a whole year, and got together much wealth in their hollow ship. And when their hollow ship was now laden to depart, they sent a messenger There 'In this paper I have rewritten and enlarged an address before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin on the Character and Influence of the Fur Trade in Wisconsin, published in the Proceedings of the Thirty- sixth Annual Meeting, 1889. I am under obligations to Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites, Secretary of this society, for his generous assistance in pro- curing material for my work, and to Professor Charles H. Haskins, my colleague, who kindly read both manuscript and proof and made helpful suggestions. The reader will notice that throughout the paper I have used the word Northwest in a limited sense as referring to the region included between the Great Lakes and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. 8 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [548 came a man versed in craft to my father's house with a golden chain strung here and there with amber beads. Now, the maidens in the hall and my lady mother were handling the chain and gazing on it and offering him their price." It M^ould appear that the traders at first sailed from port to port, bartering as they went. After a time they stayed at certain profitable places a twelvemonth, still trading from their ships. Then came the fixed factory, and about it grew the trading colony.^ The Phoenician trading post wove together the fabric of oriental civilization, brought arts and the alphabet to Greece, brought the elements of civilization to northern Africa, and disseminated eastern culture through the Mediterranean system of lands. It blended races and customs, developed commercial confidence, fostered the custom of depending on outside nations for certain supplies, and afforded a means of peaceful intercourse between societies naturally hostile. Carthaginian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman trading posts continued the process. By traffic in amber, tin, furs, etc., with the tribes of the north of Europe, a continental com- merce was developed. The routes of this trade have been ascertained.- For over a thousand years before the migra- tion of the peoples Mediterranean commerce had flowed along the interlacing river valleys of Europe, and trading posts had been established. Museums show how important an effect was produced upon the economic life of northern Europe by this intercourse. It is a significant fact that the routes of the migration of the peoples were to a considerable extent the routes of Roman trade, and it is well worth inquiry whether this commerce did not leave more traces ' Oa the trading colony, see Roscher und Jannaseh, Colonien, p. 12. 'Consult: Miillenhoff, Altertumskunde, I., 212 ; Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, New York, 1890, pp. 348 ff.; Pliny, Naturalis Historia, xxvii., 11; Montelius, Civilization of Sweden in Heathen Times, 98-99 ; Du Chaillu, Viking Age ; and the citations in Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, 466-7; Keary, Vikings in Western Christendom, 23. 549] Introduction. 9 upon Teutonic society than we have heretofore considered, and whether one cause of the migrations of the peoples has not been neglected/ That stage in the development of society when a primitive people comes into contact with a more advanced people deserves more study than has been given to it. As a factor in breaking the "cake of custom" the meeting of two such societies is of great importance; and if, with Starcke,^ we trace the origin of the family to economic considerations, and, with Schrader,^ the institution of guest friendship to the same source, we may certainly expect to find important influences upon primitive society arising from commerce with a higher people. The extent to which such commerce has affected all peoples is remarkable. One may study the process from the days of Phoenicia to the days of England in Africa,^ but no- where is the material more abundant than in the history of the relations of the Europeans and the American Indians. The Phoenician factory, it is true, fostered the development of the Mediterranean civilization, while in America the trading post exploited the natives. The explanation of this difierence is to be sought partly in race differences, partly in the greater gulf that separated the civilization of the European from the civilization of the American Indian as compared with that Avhich parted the early Greeks and the Phoenicians. But the study of the destructive effect of the trading post is valuable as well as the study of its elevating influences ; in both cases the effects are important and worth investigation and comparison. ' In illustration it may be noted that the early Scandinavian power in Russia seized upon the trade route by the Dnieper and the Duna. Keary, Vikings, 173. See also ^os^, pp. 36, 38. 'Stareke, Primitive Family. ^Schrader, 1. c; see also Ihring, in Deutsche Rundschau, III., 357, 420 ; Kulischer, Der Handel auf primitiven Kulturstufen, in Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sp-achivissenschaft, X., 378. Vide post, p. 10. •'W. Bosworth Smith, in a suggestive article in the Nineteenth Century, December, 1887, shows the influence of the Mohammedan trade in Africa. 10 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [550 Primitive Inter-Tribal Trade. Long before the advent of the white trader, inter-tribal commercial intercourse existed. Mr. Charles Rau^ and Sir Daniel Wilson"' have shown that inter-tribal trade and divi- sion of labor were common among the mound-builders and in the stone age generally. In historic times there is ample evidence of inter-tribal trade. Were positive evidence lack- ing, Indian institutions would disclose the fact. Differences in language were obviated by the sign language,'" a fixed system of communication, intelligible to all the western tribes at least. The peace pipe,* or calumet, was used for settling disputes, strengthening alliances, and speaking to strangers — a sanctity attached to it. Wampum belts served in New England and the middle region as money and as symbols in the ratification of treaties."" The Chippeways had an institution called by a term signifying " to enter one another's lodges," '' whereby a truce was made between them and the Sioux at the winter hunting season. During these seasons of peace it was not uncommon for a member of one tribe to adopt a member of another as his brother, a tie which was respected even after the expiration of the truce. The analogy of this custom to the classical "guest-friend- ship " needs no comment ; and the economic cause of the institution is worth remark, as one of the means by which the rigor of primitive inter-tribal hostility was mitigated. But it is not necessary to depend upon indirect evidence. The earliest travellers testify to the existence of a wide inter- tribal commerce. The historians of De Soto's expedition ' Smithsonian Report, 1872. -Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 1889, VII., 59. See also Thruston, Antiquities of Tennessee, 79 ff. ^Mallery, in Bureau of Ethnology, I., a24 ; Clark, Indian Sign Lan- guage, ''Shea, Discovery of the Mississippi, 34. Catilinite pipes were widely used, even along the Atlantic slope, Thruston, 80-81. ^Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, I., ch. ii. * Minnesota Flistorical Collections, V., 267. 551] Early Trade along the Atlantic Coast. 11 mention Indian merchants who sold salt to the inland tribes. " In 1565 and for some years previous bison skins were brought by the Indians down the Potomac, and thence carried along-shore in canoes to the French about the Gulf of St. Lawrence. During two years six thousand skins were thus obtained." ^ An Algonquin brought to Champlain at Quebec a piece of copper a foot long, which he said came from a tributary of the Great Lakes.' Champlain also reports that among the Canadian Indians village councils were held to determine what number of men might go to trade with other tribes in the summer." Morton in 1632 describes similar inter-tribal trade in JS'ew England, and adds that certain utensils are " but in certain parts of the country made, where the severall trades are appropriated to the inhabitants of those jtarts onely."^ Marquette relates that the Illinois bought firearms of the Indians who traded directly with the French, and that they went to the south and west to carry off slaves, which they sold at a high price to other nations.'' It was on the foundation, therefore, of an extensive inter-tribal trade that the white man built up the forest commerce.'' Early Trade along the Atlantic Coast. The chroniclers of the earliest voyages to the Atlantic coast abound in references to this traffic. First of Euro- peans to purchase native furs in America appear to have been the Norsemen who settled Vinland. In the saga of Eric the Red ' we find this interesting account : " Thereupon ' Parkman, Pioneers of Prance in the New World, 230, citing Menendez. - Neill, in Narrative and Critical History of America, IV., 104. ^Champlain's Voyages (Prince Society), III., 183. ■* Morton, New English Canaan (Prince Society), 159. ^Shea, Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley, 32. ®Por additional evidence see Radisson, Voyages (Prince Society), 91, 173; Massachusetts Historical Collections, I., 151 ; Smithsonian Contri- butions, XVI. ,30 ; Jesuit Relations, 1671, 41 ; Thruston, Antiquities, etc., 79-82 ; Carr, Mounds of the Mississippi Valley, 25, 27 ; and^os^ pp. 26-7, 36. ■' Reeves, Finding of Wineland the Good, 47. 12 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [552 Karlsefni and his people displayed their shields, and when they came together they began to barter with each other. Especially did the strangers wish to buy red cloth, for which they offered in exchange peltries and quite grey skins. They also desired to buy swords and spears, but Karlsefni and Snorri forbade this. In exchange for perfect unsullied skins the Skrellings would take red stuif a span in length, which they would bind around their heads. So their trade went on for a time, until Karlsefni and his people began to grow short of cloth, when they divided it into such narrow pieces that it was not more than a finger's breadth wide, but the Skrellings still continued to give just as much for this as before, or more." The account of Verrazano's voyage' mentions his Indian trade. Captain John Smith, exploring New England in 1614, brought back a cargo of fish and 11,000 beaver skins.^ These examples could be multiplied ; in short, a way was prepared for colonization by the creation of a demand for European goods, and thus the opportunity for a lodgement was afforded. New England Indian Trade. The Indian trade has a place in the early history of the New England colonies. The Plymouth settlers " found divers corn fields and little running brooks, a place .... fit for situation,"^ and settled down cuckoo-like in Indian clearings. Mr. Weeden has shown that the Indian trade furnished a currency (wampum) to New England, and that it afforded the beginnings of her commerce. In September of their first year the Plymouth men sent out a shallop to trade with the Indians, and when a ship arrived from England in 1621 they speedily loaded her with a return •N. Y. Hist. Colls., I., 54-55, 59. 2 Smith, Generall Historie (Kichmond, 1819), 1., 87-8, 182, 199; Strachey's Travaile into Virginia, 157 (Hakluyt Soc. VI.) ; Parkman, Pioneers, 230. Bradford, Plymouth Plantation. 553] Indian Trade in the Middle Colonies. 13 cargo of heavier and lumber.^ By frequent legislation the colonies regulated and fostered the trade.' Bradford reports that in a single year twenty hhd. of furs were shipped from Plymouth, and that between 1631 and 1636 their shipments amounted to 12,150 li. beaver and 1156 li. otter .^ Morton in his * New English Canaan ' alleges that a servant of his was " thought to have a thousand pounds in ready gold gotten by the beaver when he died." ' In the pursuit of thie trade men passed continually farther into the wilderness, and their trading posts " generally became the pioneers of new settle- ments.'" For example, the posts of Oldham, a Puritan trader, led the way for the settlements on the Connecticut river," and in their early days these towns were partly sus- tained by the Indian trade.' Not only did the New England traders expel the Dutch from this valley ; they contended with them on the Hudson.*^ Indian Trade in the Middle Colonies. Morton, in the work already referred to, protested against allowing " the Great Lake of the Erocoise " (Champlain) to the Dutch, saying that it is excellent for the fur trade, and that the Dutch have gained by beaver 20,000 pounds a year. Exaggerated though the statement is, it is true that the energies of the Dutch were devoted to this trade, rather than to agricultural settlement. As in the case of New » Bradford, 104. "E. g., Plymouth Records, I., 50, 54, 62, 119 ; II., 10 ; Massachusetts Colonial Records, L, 55, 81, 96, 100, 322 ; II, , 86, 138 ; III., 424 ; V., 180; Hazard, Historical Collections, II., 19 (the Commissioners of the United Colonies propose giving the monopoly of the fur trade to a corpora- tion). On public truck-houses, vide post, p. 58. ^ Bradford, 108, gives the proceeds of the sale of these furs. ^ Force, Collections, Vol. I., No. 5, p. 53. ^Weeden, I., 132, 160-1. « Winthrop, History of New England, I., Ill, 131. ^Connecticut Colonial Records, 1637, pp. 11, 18. ^Weeden, I., 126. 14 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [554 France the settlers dispersed themselves in the Indian trade ; so general did this become that laws had to be passed to compel the raising of crops.^ New York City (New Amster- dam) was founded and for a time sustained by the fur trade. In their search for peltries the Dutch were drawn up the Hudson, u}) the Connecticut, and down the Delaware, where they had Swedes for their rivals. By way of the Hudson the Dutch traders had access to Lake Champlain, and to the Mohawk, the headwaters of which connected through the lakes of western New York with Lake Ontario. This region, which was supplied by the trading post of Orange (Albany), was the seat of the Iroquois confederacy. The results of the trade upon Indian society became apparent in a short time in the most decisive way. Furnished with arms by the Dutch, the Iroquois turned upon the neighboring Indians, whom the French had at first refrained from supply- ing with guns.^ In 1649 they completely ruined the Hurons,^ a part of whom fled to the woods of northern Wisconsin. In the years immediately following, the Neutral Nation and the Erics fell under their power; they overawed the New England Indians and the Southern tribes, and their hunting and war parties visited Illinois and drove Indians of those plains into Wisconsin. Thus by priority in securing fire- arms, as well as by their remarkable civil organization,' the Iroquois secured possession of the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie. The French had accepted the alliance of the Algonquins and the Hurons, as the Dutch, and afterward the English, had that of the Iroquois ; so these victories of the Iroquois cut the French oif from the entrance to the Great Lakes by way of the upper St. Ijawrence. As early as 1629 the Dutch trade was estimated at 50,000 guilders ' New York Colonial Documents, I., 181, 389, §7. -Ibid. 183 ; Collection de manuscrits relatifs a la Nouvelle-France, I., 254; Radisson,93. 2 Parkman, Jesuits in North America ; Radisson ; Margry, D6couvertes et Etablissemens, etc., IV., 586-598 ; Tailhan, Nicholas Perrot. •* Morgan, League of the Iroquois. 555] Indian Trade in the Middle Colonies. 15 per annum, and the Delaware trade alone produced 10,000 skins yearly in 1663.^ The English succeeded to this trade, and under Governor Dongan they made particular efforts to extend their operations to the Northwest, using the Iroquois as middlemen. Although the French were in possession of the trade with the Algonquins of the Northwest, the English had an economic advantage in competing for this trade in the fact that Albany traders, whose situation enabled them to import their goods more easily than Montreal traders could, and who were burdened with fewer governmental restrictions, were able to pay fifty per cent more for beaver and give better goods. French traders frequently received their supplies from Albany, a practice against which the English authorities legislated in 1720; and the coureurs de bois smuggled their furs to the same place.'^ As early as 1666 Talon proposed that the king of France should pur- chase New York, " whereby he would have two entrances to Canada and by which he would give to the French all the peltries of the north, of which the English share the profit by the communication which they have with the Iroquois by Manhattan and Orange."^ It is a characteristic of the fur trade that it continually recedes from the original center, and so it happened that the English traders before long attempted to work their way into the Illinois country. The wars between the French and English and Iroquois must be read in the light of this fact. At the outbreak of the last ' N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 408-9 ; V., 687, 736 ; Histoire et Commerce des Colonies Angloises, 154. 2N. Y. Col. Docs., III., 471, 474 ; IX., 298, 319. '^ Ibid. IX., 57. The same proposal was made in 1681 by Du Chesneau, ibid. IX., 165. ''Parkraan's works; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 165; Shea's Charlevoix, IV., 16: "The English, indeed, as already remarked, from that time shared with the French in the fur trade ; and this was the chief motive of their fomenting war between us and the Iroquois, inasmuch as they could get no good furs, which come from the northern districts, except by m?ans of these Indians, who could scarcely eJEfect a reconciliation with us without precluding them from this precious mine." 16 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [556 French and Indian war, however, it was rather Pennsylvania and Virginia traders who visited the Ohio Valley. It is said that some three hundred of them came over the moun- tains yearly, following the Susquehanna and the Juniata and the headwaters of the Potomac to the tributaries of the Ohio, and visiting with their pack-horses the Indian villages along the valley. The center of the English trade was Pickawil- lani on the Great Miami. In 1749 Celoron de Bienville, who had been sent out to vindicate French authority in the valley, reported that each village along the Ohio and its branches " has one or more English traders, and each of these has hired men to carry his furs."' Indian Trade in the Southern Colonies. The Indian trade of the Virginians was not limited to the Ohio country. As in the case of Massachusetts Bay, the trade had been provided for before the colony left England,' and in times of need it had preserved the infant settlement. Bacon's rebellion was in part due to the opposition to the governor's trading relations with the savages. After a time the nearer Indians were exploited, and as early as the close of the seventeenth century Virginia traders sought the Indians west of the Alleghanies.'^ The Cherokees lived among the mountains, " where the present states of Tennes- see, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas join one another."^ To the west, on the Mississippi, were the Chickasaws, south of whom lived the Choctaws, while to the south of the Cherokees were the Creeks. The Catawbas had their villages on the border of North and South Carolina, about the headwaters of the Santee river. Shawnese Indians had formerly lived on the Cumberland river, and French traders had been among them, as well as along the Missis- ^ Parkinan, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 50. 2 Charter of 1606. 'Ramsay, Tennessee, 63. ^ On the Southwestern Indians see Adair, American Indians. 557] Indian Trade in the Southern Colonies. 17 sippi ; ^ but by the time of the English traders, Tennessee and Kentucky were for the most part uninhabited. The Vir- ginia traders reached the Catawbas, and for a time the Cherokees, by a trading route through the southwest of the colony to the Santee. By 1712 this trade was a well-estab- lished one,^ and caravans of one hundred pack-horses passed along the trail.^ The Carolinas had early been interested in the fur trade. In 1663 the Lords Proprietors proposed to pay the gover- nor's salary from the proceeds of the traffic. Charleston traders were the rivals of the Virginians in the southwest. They passed even to the Choctaws and Chickasaws, crossing the rivers by portable boats of skin, and sometimes taking up a permanent abode among the Indians. Virginia and Carolina traders were not on good terms with each other, and Governor Spottswood frequently made complaints of the actions of the Carolinians. His expedition across the moun- tains in 1716, if his statement is to be trusted, opened a new way to the transmontane Indians, and soon afterwards a trading company was formed under his patronage to avail themselves of this new route.'' It passed across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah valley, and down the old Indian trail to the Cherokees, who lived along the upper Tennessee. Below the bend at the Muscle Shoals the Virginians met the competition of the French traders from New Orleans and Mobile.^ The settlement of Augusta, Georgia, was another important trading post. Here in 1740 was an English garrison of fifteen or twenty soldiers, and a little band of traders, who annually took about five hundred pack-horses into the Indian country. In the spring the furs were floated down * Ramsay, 75. 'Spottswood's Letters, Virginia Hist. Colls., N. S., I., 67. "Byrd Manuscripts, I., 180. The reader will find a convenient map for the southern region in Roosevelt, Winning of the West, I. < Spottswood's Letters, L, 40 ; IL, 149, 150. * Ramsay, 64. Note the bearing of this route on the Holston settlement. 18 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [558 the river in large boats. ^ The Spaniards and the French also visited the Indians, and the rivalry over this trade was an important factor in causing diplomatic embroilment.^ The occupation of the back-lands of the South affords a prototype of the process by which the plains of the far West were settled, and also furnishes an exemplification of all the stages of economic development existing contemporaneously. After a time the traders were accompanied to the Indian grounds by hunters, and sometimes the two callings were combined.^ When Boone entered Kentucky he went with an Indian trader whose posts were on the Red river in Kentucky.* After the game decreased the hunter's clearing- was occupied by the cattle-raiser, and his home, as settlement grew, became the property of the cultivator of the soil; '' the manufacturing a-a belongs to our own time. In the South, the Middle Colonies and New England the trade opened the water-courses, the trading post grew into the palisaded town, and rival nations sought to possess the trade for themselves. Throughout the colonial frontier the effects, as well as the methods, of Indian traffic were strik- ingly alike. The trader was the pathfinder for civilization. Nor was the process limited to the east of the Mississippi. The expeditions of Verenderye led to the discovery of the Rocky Mountains.^ French traders passed up the Missouri; and when the Lewis and Clarke expedition ascended that river and crossed the continent, it went with traders and voyageurs as guides and interpreters. Indeed, Jefferson first conceived the idea of such an expedition^ from contact with Ledyard, who was organizing a fur trading company in 'Georgia Historical Collections, I., 180 ; II., 123-7. ^ Spottswood, II., 331, for example. ^ Ramsay, 65. * Boone, Life and Adventures. * Observations on the North American Land Co., pp. xv., 144, London, 1796. « Margry, VI. ' Allen, Lewis and Clarke Expedition, I., ix. ; vide post, pp. 70-71. 559] Northwestern River Systems. 19 France, and it was proposed to Congress as a means of fostering our western Indian trade.^ The first immigrant train to California was incited by the representations of an Indian trader who had visited the region, and it was guided by trappers.^ St. Louis was the center of the fur trade of the far West, and Senator Benton was intimate with leading traders like Chouteau.^ He urged the occupation of the Oregon country, where in 1810 an establishment had for a time been made by the celebrated John Jacob Astor; and he fostered legislation opening the road to the southwestern Mexican settlements long in use by the traders. The expedition of his son-in-law Fremont was made with French voyageurs, and guided to the passes by traders who had used them before."* Benton was also one of the stoutest of the early advocates of a Pacific railway. But the Northwest^ was particularly the home of the fur trade, and having seen that this traffic was not an isolated or unimportant matter, we may now proceed to study it in detail with Wisconsin as the field of investigation. Northwestern River Systems in their Relation to THE Fur Trade. The importance of physical conditions is nowhere more manifest than in the ex})loration of the Northwest, and we cannot properly appreciate Wisconsin's relation to the his- tory of the time Avithout first considering hfer situation as regards the lake and river systems of North America. ^ Vide post, p. 71. ^ Cenlury Magazine, XLT., 759. 3 Jessie Benton Fremont in Century 3Iagazine, XLI., 766-7. * Century Magazine, XLI., p. 759 ; vide post, p. 74. 'Parkrnan's works, particularly Old Regime, make any discussion of the importance of the fur trade to Canada proper unnecessHry. La Hontan says : " For you must know that Canada subsists only upon the trade of skins or furs, three-fourths of which come from the people that live around the Great Lakes." La Ilontan, L, 53, London, 1703. 20 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [560 When the Breton sailors, steering their fishing smacks almost in the wake of Cabot, began to fish in the St. Law- rence gulf, and to traffic with the natives of the mainland for peltries, the problem of how the interior of North America was to be explored was solved. The water-system composed of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes is the key to the continent. The early explorations in a wilderness must be by water-courses — they are nature's highways. The St. Law- rence leads to the Great Lakes ; the headwaters of the tributaries of these lakes lie so near the headwaters of the rivers that join the Mississippi that canoes can be portaged from the one to the other. The Mississippi aiFords passage to the Gulf of Mexico ; or by the Missouri to the passes of the Rocky Mountains, where rise the headwaters of the Columbia, which brings the voyageur to the Pacific. But if the explorer follows Lake Superior to the present boundary line between Minnesota and Canada, and takes the chain of lakes and rivers extending from Pigeon river to Rainy lake and Lake of the Woods, he will be led to the Winnipeg river and to the lake of the same name. From this, by streams and portages, he may reach Hudson bay ; or he may go by way of Elk river and Lake Athabasca to Slave river and Slave lake, which will take him to Mackenzie river and to the Arctic sea. But Lake Winnipeg also receives the waters of the Saskatchewan river, from which one may pass to the highlands near the Pacific where rise the northern branches of the Columbia. And from the lakes of Canada there are still other routes to the Oregon country.^ At a later day these two routes to the Columbia became an important factor in bringing British and Americans into conflict over that territory. In these water-systems Wisconsin was the link that joined the Cireat Lakes and the Mississippi ; and along her northern shore the first explorers passed to the Pigeon river, or, as it was called later, the Grand Portage route, along the bound- ' Narr. and Grit. Hist. Amer., VIII., 10-11. 561] Northwestern River Systems. 21 ary line between Minnesota and Canada into the heart of Canada. It was possible to reach the Mississippi from the Great Lakes by the following principal routes : ' 1. By the Miami (Maumee) river from the west end of Lake Erie to the Wabash, thence to the Ohio and the Mississippi. 2. By the St. Joseph's river to the Wabash, thence to the Ohio. ' 3. By the St. Joseph's river to the Kankakee, and thence to the Illinois and the Mississippi. 4. By the Chicago river to the Illinois. 5. By Green bay, Fox river, and the Wisconsin river. 6. By the Bois Brule river to the St. Croix river. Of these routes, the first two were not at first available, owing to the hostility of the Iroquois. Of all the colonies that fell to the English, as we have seen, New York alone had a water-system that favored com- munication with the interior, tapping the St. Lawrence and opening a way to Lake Ontario. Prevented by the Iroquois friends of the Dutch and English from reaching the North- west by way of the lower lakes, the French ascended the Ottawa, reached Lake Nipissing, and passed by way of Georgian Bay to the islands of Lake Huron. As late as the nineteenth century this was the common route of the fur trade, for it was more certain for the birch canoes than the tempestuous route of the lakes. At the Huron islands two ways opened before their canoes. The straits of Michilli- mackinac" permitted them to enter Lake Michigan, and from this led the two routes to the Mississippi : one by way of Green bay and the Fox and Wisconsin, and the other by way of the lake to the Chicago river. But if the trader chose to go from the Huron islands through Sault Ste. Marie ' Narr. and Crit. Hist. Amer., IV., 224, n. 1 ; Margry, V. See also Parkman, Montcalm aud Wolfe, I., map and pp. 38-9, 128. Mackinaw. 22 The Indian Trade in Wiseonsin. [562 into Lake Superior, the necessities of his frail craft required him to hug the shore, and the rumors of copper mines induced the first traders to take the south shore, and here the lakes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota afford con- necting links between the streams that seek Lake Superior and those that seek the Mississippi,^ a fact which made northern Wisconsin more important in this epoch than the southern portion of the state. We are now able to see how the river-courses of the North- west permitted a complete exploration of the country, and that in these courses Wisconsin held a commanding situation.' But these rivers not only permitted exploration ; they also furnished a motive to exploration by the fact that their valleys teemed with fur-bearing animals. This is the main fact in connection with Northwestern exploration. The hope of a route to China was always influential, as was also the search for mines, but the practical inducements were the profitable trade with the Indians for beaver and buffaloes and the wild life that accompanied it. So powerful was the combined influence of these far-stretching rivers, and the " hardy, adventurous, lawless, fascinating fur trade," that the scanty population of Canada was irresistibly drawn from agricul- tural settlements into the interminable recesses of the conti- nent; and herein is a leading explanation of the lack of permanent French influence in America. Wisconsin Indians.^ "All that relates to the Indian tribes of Wisconsin," says Dr. Shea, " their antiquities, their ethnology, their history, is deeply interesting from the fact that it is the area of the 'See Doty's enumeration, Wis. Hist. Colls., VII., 203. »Jes. Rels., 1672, p. 37; La Hontan, I., 105 (17C3). ^On these early locations, consult the authorities cited by Shea in Wis. Hist. Colls., III., 125 et seq., and by Bruiison in his criticism on Shea, ibid. IV., 223. See also Butterfield's Discovery of the Northwest in 1634, and Mag. West. Hist., V., 468, 630; and Minn. Hist. Colls., V. 663] Wisconsin Indians. 23 first meeting of the Algic and Dakota tribes. Here clans of both these wide-spread families met and mingled at a very early period ; here they first met in battle and mutually checked each other^s advance." The Winnebagoes attracted the attention of the French even before they were visited. They were located about Green bay. Their later location at the entrance of Lake Winnebago was unoccupied, at least in the time of Allouez, because of the hostility of the Sioux. Early authorities represented them as numbering about one hundred warriors.^ The Pottawattomies we find in 1641 at Sault Ste. Marie,'^ whither they had just fled from their enemies. Their proper home was probably about the southeastern shore and islands of Green bay, where as early as 1670 they were again located. Of their numbers in Wisconsin at this time we can say but little. Allouez, at Chequamegon bay, was visited by 300 of their warriors, and he mentions some of their Green bay villages, one of which had 300 souls.'^ The Menomonees were found chiefly on the river that bears their name, and the western tributaries of Green bay seem to have been their territory. On the estimates of early authorities we may say that they had about 100 warriors."* The Sauks and Foxes were closely allied tribes. The Sauks were found by Allouez'^ four leagues'' up the Fox from its mouth, and the Foxes at a place reached by a four days' ascent of the Wolf river from its mouth. Later we find them at the confluence of the Wolf and the Fox. According to their early visitors these two 'Some early estimates were as follows: 1640, "Great numbers" (Margry, I., 48); 1718, 80 to 100 warriors (N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 889); 1728, 60 or 80 warriors (Margry, VI., 55:^); 1736, 90 warriors (Chau- rignerie, cited in Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes, III., 283); 1761, 150 warriors (Gorrell, Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 32). « Margry, I., 40. sjes. Ilels., 1667, 1670. M718, estimated at 80 to 100 warriors (N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 889); 1762, estimated at 150 warriors (Gorrell, Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 32). Ues. Rels., 1670. " French leagues. 24 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [564 tribes must have had something over 1000 warriors.^ The Miamis and Mascoutins were located about a league from the Fox river, probably within the limits of what is now Green Lake county,~ and four leagues away were their friends the Kickapoos. In 1670 the Miamis and Mascoutins were esti- mated at 800 warriors, and this may have included the Kickapoos. The Sioux held possession of the Upper Mis- sissippi, and in Wisconsin hunted on its northeastern tribu- taries. Their villages were in later times all on the west of the Mississippi, and of their early numbers no estimate can be given. The Chippeways were along the southern shore of Lake Superior. Their numbers also are in doubt, but were very considerable.^ In northwestern Wisconsin, with Chequamegon bay as their rendezvous, were the Ottawas and Hurons,^ who had fled here to escape the Iroquois. In 1670 they were back again to their homes at Mackinaw and the Huron islands. But in 1666, as AUouez tells us, they were" situated at the bottom of this beautiful bay, planting their Indian corn and leading a stationary life. " They are there," he says, "to the number of eight hundred men bearing arms, but collected from seven diiferent nations who dwell in peace with each other thus mingled together.'" And the Jesuit Relations of 1670 add that the Illinois "come here from time to time in great numbers as merchants to procure hatchets, cooking utensils, guns, and other things of which they stand in need." Here, too, came Pottawattomies, as we have seen, and Sauks. ' 1670, Foxes estimated at 400 warriors (Jes. Rels., 1670); 1667, Poxes, 1000 warriors (Jes. Rels., 1667); 1695, Foxes and Mascoutins, 1200 war- riors (N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 633); 1718, Sauks 100 or 120, Foxes 500 warriors (2 Penn. Archives, VI., 54); 1728, Foxes, 200 warriors (Margry, v.); 1762, Sauks and Foxes, 700 warriors (Gorrell, Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 32). This, it must be observed, was after the Pox wars. -Jes. Rels., 1670 ; Butterfield's Discovery of the Northwest. ^ In 1820 those in Wisconsin numbered about 600 hunters. ^On these Indians consult, besides authorities already cited, Shea's Dis- covery, etc. Ix. ; Jes. Rels. ; Narr. and Grit. Hist, of Amer., IV., 168- 170, 175; Radisson's Voyages ; Margry, IV., 586-598. *Jes. Rels., 1666-7. 665] Periods of the Wisconsin Indian Trade. 25 At the mouth of Fox river^ we find another mixed village of Pottawattomies, Sauks, Foxes, and Winnebagoes, and at a later period Milwaukee was the site of a similar hetero- geneous community. Leaving out the Hurons, the tribes of Wisconsin were, with two exceptions, of the Algic stock. The exceptions are the Winnebagoes and the Sioux, who belong to the Dakota family. Of these Wisconsin tribes it is probable that the Sauks and Foxes, the Pottawattomies, the Hurons and Ottawas and the Mascoutins, and Miamis and Kickapoos, were driven into Wisconsin by the attacks of eastern enemies. The Iroquois even made incursions as far as the home of the Mascoutins on Fox river. On the other side of the state were the Sioux, " the Iroquois of the AVest," as the missionaries call them, who had once claimed all the region, and whose invasions, Allouez says, rendered Lake Winnebago uninhabited. There was therefore a pres- sure on both sides of Wisconsin which tended to mass together the divergent tribes. And the Green bay and Fox and Wisconsin route was the line of least resistance, as well as a region abounding in wild rice, fish and game, for these early fugitives. In this movement we have two facts that are not devoid of significance in institutional history : first, the welding together of separate tribes, as the Sauks and Foxes, and the Miamis, Mascoutins and Kickapoos ; and second, a commingling of detached families from various tribes at peculiarly favorable localities. Periods of the Wisconsin Indian Trade. The Indian trade was almost the sole interest in Wisconsin during the two centuries that elapsed from the visit of Nicolet in 1634 to about 1834, when lead-mining had superseded it in the southwest and land offices were opened at Green Bay and Mineral Point ; when the port of Milwaukee received an influx of settlers to the lands made known by the so-called ' Jes. Rels., 1670. 26 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [566 Black Hawk war ; and when Astor retired from the American Fur Company. These two centuries may be divided into three periods of the trade: 1. French, from 1634 to 1763; 2. English, from 1763 to 1816; 3. American, from 1816 to 1834. French Exploration in Wisconsin. Sagard,^ whose work was published in 1636, tells us that the Hurons, who traded with the French, visited the Winne- bagoes and the Fire Nation (Mascoutins),~ bartering goods for peltries. Champlain, the famous fur-trader, who repre- sented the Company of the Hundred Associates;' formed by Richelieu to monopolize the fur trade of New France and govern the country, sent an agent named Jean Nicolet, in 1634,^ to Green bay and Fox river to make a peace between the Hurons and the Winnebagoes in the interests of inter- tribal commerce. The importance of this phase of the trade as late as 1681 may be inferred from these words of Du Ches- neau, speaking of the Ottawas, and including under the term the Petun Hurons and the Chippeways also : " Through them we obtain beaver, and although they, for the most part, do not hunt, and have but a small portion of peltry in their country, they go in search of it to the most distant places, and exchange for it our merchandise which they procure at Montreal." Among the tribes enumerated as dealing with the Ottawas are the Sioux, Saiiks, Pottawattomies, Winne- bagoes, Menomonees and Mascoutins — all Wisconsin Indians at this time. He adds : " Some of these tribes occasionally come down to Montreal, but usually they do not do so in very great numbers because they are too far distant, are not expert at managing canoes, and because the other Indians intimidate 1 Histoire du Canada, 193-4 (edition of 1866), 'Dciblon, Jesuit Relations, 1671. 3 See Parkman. Pioneers, 429 ff. (1890). ^Margry, I., 50. Tlie date rests on inference; see Bibliography of Nicolet in Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., and cf. Hebberd, Wisconsin under French Dominion, 14. 567] French Exploration in Wisconsin. 27 them, in order to be the carriers of their merchandise and to profit thereby."' It was the aim of the authorities to attract the Indians to Montreal, or to develop the inter-tribal communication, and thus to centralize the trade and prevent the dissipation of the energies of the colony; but the temptations of the free forest traffic were too strong. In a memoir of 1697, Aubert de la Chesnaye says : " At first, the French went only among the Hurons, and since then to Missilimakinak, where they sold their goods to the savages of the places, who in turn went to exchange them with other savages in the depths of the woods, lands and rivers. But at present the French, having licenses, in order to secure greater profit surreptitiously, pass all the Ottawas and savages of Missilimakinak in order to go themselves to seek the most distant tribes, which is very displeasing to the former. It is they, also, who have made excellent discoveries; and four or five hundred young men, the best men of Canada, are engaged in this business. . . . They have given us knowledge of many names of savages that we did not know ; and four or five hundred leagues more remote are others who are unknown to us."^ Two of the most noteworthy of these coureurs de boi.s, or wood-rangers, were Iladisson and Groseilliers.'' In 1660 they returned to Montreal with 300 Algonquins and sixty canoes laden with furs, after a voyage in which they visited, among other tribes, the Pottawattomies, Mascoutins, Sioux, and Hurons, in Wisconsin. From the Hurons they learned of the Mississi])pi, and probably visited the river. They soon returned from Montreal to the northern Wisconsin region. In the course of their wanderings they had a post at Chequa- 'N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 160. " Margry, VI., 3 ; Coll. de Manuscrits, I., 255, where the date is wronj^ly given as 1(37G. The italics are ours. ^Radissoii, Voyages (Prince Soc. Pubs.) ; Margry, I., 53-55, 83 ; Jes. Rels., 1600; Wis. Hist. Colls., X., XI; Narrative and Critical Hist. Amer., IV., lGS-173. 28 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [568 megon bay, and they ascended the Pigeon river, thus open- ing the Grand Portage route to the heart of Canada. Among their exploits they induced England to enter the Hudson Bay trade, and gave the impetus that led to the organization of the Hudson Bay Company. The reports which these traders brought back had a most important eifect in fostering exploration in the Northwest, and led to the visit of Menard, who \vas succeeded by Allouez, the pioneers of the Jesuits in Wisconsin.' Radisson gives us a good account of the early A¥isconsin trade. Of his visit to the Ottawas he says : " We weare wellcomed & made of saying that we weare the Gods and devils of the earth ; that we should fournish them, & that they would bring us to their enemy to destroy them. We tould them [we] were very well content. We persuaded them first to come peaceably, not to distroy them presently, and if they would not condescend then would wee throw away the hatchett and make use of our thunders. We sent ambas- sadors to them w*^ guifts. That nation called Pontonate- mick^ w%ut more adoe comes and meets us with the rest, and peace was concluded." ''The savages," he writes, " love knives better than we serve God, which should make us blush for shame." In another place, " We went away free from any burden whilst those poore miserable thought them- selves happy to carry our Equipage for the hope that they had that we should give them a brasse ring, or an awle, or an needle."^ We find them using this influence in various places to make peace between hostile tribes, whom they threatened with punishment. This early commerce was carried on under the fiction of an exchange of presents. For example, Radis- son says : " We gave them severall gifts and received many. They bestowed upon us above 300 robs of castors out of wch we brought not five to the ffrench being far in the country."" 'Cf. Radisson, 173-5, and Jes. Rels., 1660, pp. 12, 30; 1663, pp. 17 ff. '' Pottawattomies in the region of Green Bay. 'Wis. Hist. Colls., XL, 67-8. *Ibid. XL, 90. 569] French Exploration in Wisconsin. 29 Among the articles used by Radisson in this trade were kettles, hatchets, knives, graters, awls, needles, tin looking- glasses, little bells, ivory combs, vermilion, sword blades, necklaces and bracelets. The sale of guns and blankets was at this time exceptional, nor does it appear that Radisson carried brandy in this voyage/ More and more the young men of Canada continued to visit the savages at their villages. By 1660 the coureurs de bois formed a distinct class,^ who, despite the laws against it, pushed from Michillimackinac into the wilderness. Wis- consin was a favorite resort of these adventurers. By the time of the arrival of the Jesuits they had made them- selves entirely at home upon our lakes. They had preceded Allouez at Chequamegon bay, and when he established his mission at Green bay he came at the invitation of the Pot- tawattomies, who wished him to " mollify some young French- men who were among them for the purpose of trading and who threatened and ill-treated them.""' He found fur traders before him on the Fox and the Wolf. Bancroft's assertion* that "religious enthusiasm took possession of the wilderness on the upper lakes and explored the Mississippi," is misleading. It is not true that "not a cape was turned, nor a mission founded, nor a river entered, nor a settlement begun, but a Jesuit led the way." In fact the Jesuits fol- lowed the traders;^ their missions were on the sites of trading posts, and they themselves often traded.^ When St. Lusson, with the coureur de bois, Nicholas Perrot, took official possession of the Northwest for France 'Radisson, 200, 217, 219. 'Suite, ia Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, V., 141 ; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 153, 140, 153 ; Margry, VI., 3 ; Parkman, Old Regime, 310-315. 3Cf. Jes. Rels., 1670, p. 93. * History of United States, II., 138 (1884). * Harrisse, Notes sur la Nouvelle France, 174-181. •Parkman, Old Regime, 328 S., and La Salle, 98 ; Margry, II., 251 ; Radisson, 173. 30 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [570 at the Sault Ste. Marie in 1671, the cost of the expedition was defrayed by trade in beaver.^ Joliet, who, accompa- nied by Marquette, descended the Mississippi by the Fox and Wisconsin route in 1673, was an experienced fur trader. While Du Lhxit, chief of the coureurs de bois, was trading on Lake Superior, La Salle,^ the greatest of these merchants, was preparing his far-reaching scheme for colonizing the Indians in the Illinois region under the direction of the French, so that they might act as a check on the inroads of the Iroquois, and aid in his plan of securing an exit for the furs of the Northwest, particularly butialo hides, by way of the Mississippi and the Gulf. La Salle's " Griifen," the earliest ship to sail the Great Lakes, was built for this trade, and received her only cargo at Green Bay. Accault, one of La Salle's traders, with Hennepin, met Du Lhut on the upper Mississippi, which he had reached by way of the Bois Brul6 and St. Croix, in 1680. Du Lhut's trade awakened the jealousy of La Salle, who writes in 1682: "If they go by way of the Ouisconsing, where for the present the chase of the buiFalo is carried on and where I have commenced an establishment, they will ruin the trade on which alone I rely, on account of the great number of buffalo which are taken there every year, almost beyond belief." ^ Speaking of the Jesuits at Green Bay, he declares that they " have in truth the key to the beaver country, where a brother blacksmith that they have and two companions convert more iron into beaver than the fathers convert savages into Christians."* Perrot says that the beaver north of the mouth of the Wis- consin were better than those of the Illinois country, and the chase was carried on in this region for a longer period;^ and we know from Dablon that the Wisconsin savages were ^See Talon's report quoted in Narr. and Crit. Hist. Araer., IV., 175. * Margry abounds in evidences of La Salle's commercial activity, as does Parkman's La Salle. See also Dunn, Indiana, 20-1. 3 Margry, II., 254. niargry, II., 251. *Tailhan's Perrot, 57. 571] French Exploration in Wisconsin. 31 not compelled to separate by families during the hunting season, as was common among other tribes, because the game here was so abundant.^ Aside from its importance as a key to the Northwestern trade, Wisconsin seems to have been a rich field of traffic itself. With such extensive operations as the foregoing in the region reached by Wisconsin rivers, it is obvious that the government could not keep the coureurs de hois from the woods. Even governors like Frontenac connived at the traffic and shared its ])rofits. In 1681 the government decided to issue annual licenses,^ and messengers were dis- patched to announce amnesty to the coureurs de hois about Green Bay and the south shore of Lake Superior.^ We may now offer some conclusions upon the connection of the fur trade with French explorations : 1. The explorations were generally induced and almost always rendered profitable by the fur trade. In addition to what has been presented on this point, note the following : In 1669, Patoulet writes to Colbert concerning La Salle's voyage to explore a passage to Japan : " The enterprise is difficult and dangerous, but the good thing about it is that the King will be at no expense for this pretended discovery,"* The king's instructions to Governor De la Barre in 1682 say that, "Several inhabitants of Canada, excited by the hope of the profit to be realized from the trade with the Indians for furs, have undertaken at various periods dis- coveries in the countries of the Nadoussioux, the river Mississipy, and other parts of America."^ 2. The early traders were regarded as quasi-supernatural 'Jes. Rels., 1670. 2 La Uoutau, I., 53 ; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 159 ; Parkman, Old Regime, 305. ^Margry, VI., 45. *Margry, I., 81. "N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 137. On the cost of such expeditions, see docu- ments in Margry, I., 293-296 ; VI., 503-507. On the profits of the trade, see La Salle iu 2 Penna. Archives, VI., 18-19. 32 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [572 beings by the Indians.^ They alone could supply the coveted iron implements, the trinkets that tickled the savage's fancy, the " fire-water," and the guns that gave such increased power over game and the enemy. In the course of a few years the Wisconsin savages passed from the use of the implements of the stone age to the use of such an important product of the iron age as firearms. They passed also from the economic stage in which their hunting was for food and clothing simply, to that stage in which their hunting was made systematic and stimulated by the European demand for furs. The trade tended to perpetuate the hunter stage by making it profitable, and it tended to reduce the Indian to economic dependence " upon the Europeans, for while he learned to use the white man's gun he did not learn to make it or even to mend it. In this transition stage from their primitive con- dition the influence of the trader over the Indians was all-powerful. The pre-eminence of the individual Indian who owned a gun made all the warriors of the tribe eager to possess like power. The tribe thus armed placed their enemies at such a disadvantage that they too must have like weapons or lose their homes.^ No wonder that La Salle was able to say : " The savages take better care of us French than of their own children. From us only can they get guns and goods."^ This was the power that France used to sup- port her in the struggle with England for the Northwest. 3. The trader used his influence to promote peace between the Northwestern Indians.^ ' See Radisson, ante, p. 28. ' Vide post, p. 62. 3 Vide ante, p. 14 ; Radisson, 154 ; Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 427. Com- pare the effects of the introduction of bronze weapons into Europe. * Margry, II., 284. On the power possessed by the French through this trade consult also D'Iberville's plan for locating Wisconsin Indians on the Illinois by changing their trading posts; see Margry, IV., 586-598. 5 Wis. Hist. Colls., XL, 67-8, 90 ; Narr. andCrit. Hist. Amer.,IV., 182 ; Perrot, 327 ; Margry, VI., 507-509, 653-4. 673] French Posts in Wisconsin. 33 French Posts in Wisconsin. In the governorship of Dongan of New York, as has been noted, the English were endeavoring to secure the trade of the Northwest. As early as 1685, English traders had reached Michillimackinac, the depot of supplies for the coureur de bois, where they were cordially received by the Indians, owing to their cheaper goods.^ At the same time the English on Hudson Bay were drawing trade to their posts in that region. The French were thoroughly alarmed. They saw the necessity of holding the Indians by trading posts in their midst, lest they should go to the English, for as Begon declared, the savages " always take the part of those with whom they trade." ^ It is at this time that the French occupation of the Northwest begins to assume a new phase. Stockaded trading posts were established at such key-points as a strait, a portage, a river-mouth, or an important lake, where also were Indian villages. In 1685 the celebrated Nicholas Perrot was given command of Green Bay and its dependencies.^ He had trading posts near Trempealeau and at Fort St. Antoine on the Wisconsin side of Lake Pepin where he traded with the Sioux, and for a time he had a post and worked the lead-mines above the Des Moines river. Both these and Fort St. Nicholas at the mouth of the Wisconsin * were dependencies of Green Bay. Du Lhut probably established Fort St. Croix at the portage between the Bois Brule river and the St. Croix.^ In 1695 Le Sueur built a fort on the largest island above Lake Pepin, and he also asked the command of the post of Chequamegon.® These official posts were supported by the profits of Indian »N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 296, 308 ; IV., 735. * Quoted in Sheldon, Early History of Michigan, 310. ^Tailhan's Perrot, 156. *"Wis. Hist. Colls., X., 54, 300-302, 307, 321. "Narr. and Crit. Hist. Amer., IV., 186. •Margry, VI., 60. Near Ashland, Wis. 34 2^he Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [574 commerce/ and were designed to keep the northwestern tribes at peace, and to prevent the English and Iroquois influence from getting the fur trade. The Fox Wars. In 1683 Perrot had collected Wisconsin Indians for an attack on the Iroquois, and again in 1686 he led them against the same enemy. But the efforts of the Iroquois and the English to enter the region with their cheaper and better goods, and the natural tendency of savages to plunder when assured of supplies from other sources, now overcame the control which the French had exercised. The Sauks and Foxes, the Mascoutins, Kickapoos and Miamis, as has been described, held the Fox and Wisconsin route to the West, the natural and easy highway to the Mississippi, as La Hontan calls it.^ Green Bay commanded this route, as La Pointe de Chagouamigon^ commanded the Lake Superior route to the Bois Brule and the St. Croix. One of Perrot's main objects was to supply the Sioux on the other side of the Mississippi, and these were the routes to them. To the Illinois region, also, the Fox route was the natural one. The Indians of this waterway therefore held the key to the French position, and might attempt to prevent the passage of French goods and support English influence and trade, or they might try to monopolize the intermediate trade themselves, or they might try to combine both policies. As early as 1687 the Foxes, Mascoutins and Kickapoos, ' Consult French MSS., 3d series, VI., Pari. Library, Ottawa, cited in Minn. Hist. Colls., V,, 423 ; Id., V., 425. In 1731 M. La Ronde, having constructed at his own expense a bark of forty tons on Lake Superior, received the post of La Pointe de Chagouaraigon as a gratuity to defray his expenses. See also the story of Verenderye's posts, in Parkman's article in Atlantic Monthly, June, 1887, and Margry, VI. See also 2 Penna. Archives, VI., 18; La Houtan, L, 53; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 159 ; Tailhan, Perrot, 302. 2 La Hontan, I., 105. 3 Near Ashland, Wis. 575] The Fox Wars. 35 animated apparently by hostility to the trade carried on by Perrot with the Sioux, their enemy at that time, threatened to pillage the post at Green Bay.' The closing of the Ottawa to the northern fur trade by the Iroquois for three years, a blow which nearly ruined Canada in the days of Frontenac, as Parkman has described,^ not only kept vast stores of furs from coming down from Michillimackinac ; it must, also, have kept goods from reaching the northwestern Indians. In 1692 the Mascoutins, who attributed the death of some of their men to Perrot, plundered his goods, and the Foxes soon entered into negotiation with the Iroquois.'' Frontenac expressed great apprehension lest with their allies on the Fox and Wisconsin route they should remove eastward and come into connection with the Iroquois and the English, a grave danger to New France.^ Nor was this apprehension without reason.'^ Even such docile allies as the Ottawas and Pottawattomies threatened to leave the French if goods were not sent to them wherewith to oppose their enemies. " They have powder and iron," complained an Ottawa deputy ; "how can we sustain ourselves? Have compassion, then, on us, and consider that it is no easy matter to kill men with clubs."" By the end of the seventeenth century the dis- affected Indians closed the Fox and Wisconsin route against French trade.' In 1699 an order was issued recalling the French from the Northwest, it being the design to concen- trate French power at the nearer posts.** Detroit was founded in 1701 as a place to which to attract the north- western trade and intercept the English. In 1702 the priest at St. Joseph reported that the English were sending presents ■Tailhan, Perrot, 139, 302. ^Frontenac, 315-816. Cf. Perrot, 303. •'Perrot, 331 ; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 633. *lbid. ^ N. Y. Col. Docs., IV., 732-7. «N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 673. 'Shea, Early Voyages, 49. ^Kingsford, Canada, II., 394 ; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 635. 36 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [576 to the Miamis about that post and desiring to form an estab- lishment in their country.^ At the same date we find D'Iberville, of Louisiana, proposing a scheme for drawing the Miamis, Mascoutins and Kickapoos from the Wisconsin streams to the Illinois, by changing their trading posts from Green Bay to the latter region, and drawing the Illinois by trading posts to the lower Ohio.- It was shortly after this that the Miamis and Kickapoos passed south under either the French or English influence,'' and the hostility of the Foxes became more pronounced. A part of the scheme of La Motte Cadillac at Detroit was to colonize Indians about that post,"* and in 1712 Foxes, Sauks, Mascoutins, Kickapoos, Pottawattomies, Hurons, Ottawas, Illinois, Menomonees and others were gathered there under the influence of trade. But soon, whether by design of the French and their allies or otherwise, hostilities broke out against the Foxes and their allies. The animus of the combat appears in the cries of the Foxes as they raised red blankets for flags and shouted "We have no father but the English ! " while the allies of the French replied, " The English are cowards ; they destroy the Indians with brandy and are enemies of the' true God ! " The Foxes were defeated with great slaughter and driven back to Wisconsin.^ From this time until 1734 the French waged war against the Foxes with but short intermissions. The Foxes allied themselves with the Iroquois and the Sioux, and acted as middlemen between the latter and the traders, refusing passage to goods on the ground that it would damage their own trade to allow this.*^ They fostered hostilities between their old foes the Chippeways and their new allies the Sioux, and thus they cut off English intercourse with the latter by way 'Margry, v., 219. «/&id. IV.,597. 3 Wis. Hist. Colls., TIL, 149; Smith, Wisconsin, II., 315. *Coll. deManus., III., 622. 'See Hebberd's account, Wisconsin under French Dominion ; Coll. de Manus., I., 623; Smith, Wisconsin, II., 315. «Margry, VI., 543. 577] The Fox Wars. 37 of the north. This trade between the Chippeways and the Sioux was important to the French, and commandants were repeatedly sent to La Pointe de Chagouamigon and the upper Mississippi to make peace between the two tribes.^ While the wars were in progress the English took pains to enforce their laws against furnishing Indian goods to French traders. The English had for a time permitted this, and their own Indian trade had suffered because the French were able to make use of the cheap English goods. By their change in policy the English now brought home to the sav- ages the fact that French goods were dearer.^ Moreover, English traders were sent to Niagara to deal directly with " the far Indians," and the Foxes visited the English and Iroquois, and secured a promise that they might take up their abode with the latter and form an additional member of the confederacy in case of need.^' As a counter policy the French attempted to exterminate the Foxes, and detached the Sioux from their alliance with the Foxes by establishing Fort Beauharnois, a trading post on the Minnesota side of Lake Pepin.* The results of these wars were as follows : 1. They spread the feeling of defection among the North- western Indians, who could no longer be restrained, as at first, by the threat of cutting off their trade, there being now rivals in the shape of the English, and the French traders from Louisiana." 2. They caused a readjustment of the Indian map of Wisconsin. The Mascoutins and the Pottawattomies had 1 Tailhan, V^xvot, passim ; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 570, 619, 621 ; Mar- gry, VI., 507-509, 553, 653-4; Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 422, 425; Wis. Hist. Colls., III., 154. 'N. Y. Col. Docs., v., 726 flf. Ubid. IV., 732, 735, 796-7; V., 687, 911. niatgry, VI., 553, 563, 575-580; Neill in Mag. Western History, November, 1887. 'Perrot, 148 ; Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 4S ; Hebberd, Wis- consin under French Dominion, chapters on the Fox wars. 38 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [578 already moved southward to the Illinois country. Now the Foxes, driven from their river, passed first to Prairie du Chien and then down the Mississippi. The Sauks went at first to the Wisconsin, near Sauk Prairie, and then joined the Foxes. The Winnebagoes gradually extended themselves along the Fox and Wisconsin. The Chippeways,^ freed from their fear of the Foxes, to w^hom the Wolf and the Wisconsin had given access to the northern portion of the state, now passed south to Lac du Flambeau,^ to the headwaters of the Wisconsin, and to Lac Court Oreilles.^ 3. The closing of the Fox and Wisconsin route fostered that movement of trade and exploration which at this time began to turn to the far Northwest along the Pigeon river route into central British America, in search of the Sea of the West,* whereby the Rocky Mountains were discovered ; and it may have aided in turning settlement into the Illinois country. 4. These wars were a part of a connected series, including the Iroquois wars, the Fox wars, the attack of the Wisconsin trader, Charles de Langlade, upon the center of English trade at Pickawillany,^ Ohio, and the French and Indian war that followed. All were successive stages of the struggle against English trade in the French possessions. French Settlement in Wisconsin. Settlement was not the object of the French in the North- west. The authorities saw as clearly as do we that the field was too vast for the resources of the colony, and they desired to hold the region as a source of peltries, and contract their settlements. The only towns worthy of the name in the Northwest were Detroit and the settlements in Indiana and 1 Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 190-1. -Oneida county. ^ Sawyer county. ■» Margry, VI. ' Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 84, and citations ; vide post, p. 41. 579] French Settlement in Wisconsin. 39 Elinois, all of which depended largely on the fur trade.' But in spite of the government the traffic also produced the begin- nings of settlement in Wisconsin. About the middle of the century, Augustin de Langlade had made Green Bay his trading post. After Pontiac's war,'^ Charles de Langlade^ made the place his permanent residence, and a little settle- ment grew np. At Prairie du Chien French traders annu- ally met the Indians, and at this time there may have been a stockaded trading post there, but it was not a permanent settlement until the close of the Revolutionary war. Chequa- megon bay was deserted* at the outbreak of the French war. There may have been a regular trading post at Milwaukee in this period, but the first trader recorded is not until 1762.^ Doubtless wintering posts existed at other points in Wis- consin. The characteristic feature of French occupancy of the Northwest was the trading post, and in illustration of it, and of the centralized administration of the French, the following account of De llepentigny's fort at Sault Ste. Marie (Mich- igan) is given in the words of Governor La Jonquiere to the minister for the colonies in 1751 :" " He arrived too late last year at the Sault Ste. Marie to fortify himself well ; however, he secured himself in a sort of fort large enough to receive the traders of Missilimakinac .... He employed his hired men during the whole winter in cutting 1100 pickets of fifteen feet for his fort, with the doublings, and the timber necessary for the construction of three houses, one of them thirty feet long by twenty wide, and two others twenty-five feet long and the same width as the ' Fergus, Historical Series, No. 12 ; Breese, Early History of Illinois ; Dunn, Indiana; Hubbard, Memorials of a Half Century ; Monette, His- tory of the Valley of the Mississippi, I., ch. iv. ' Henry, Travels, ch. x. ^SeeMemoirin Wis. Hist. Colls., VII.; III., 224; VII., 127, 152, 166. * Henry, Travels. -Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 35. 'Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 435-6. 40 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [580 first. His fort is entirely furnished with the exception of a redoubt of oak, which he is to have made twelve feet square, and which shall reach the same distance above the gate of the fort. His fort is 110 feet square. "As for the cultivation of the lands, the Sieur de Repen- tigny has a bull, two bullocks, three cows, two heifers, one horse and a mare from Missilimakinac He has en- gaged a Frenchman who married at Sault Ste. Marie an Indian woman to take a farm; they have cleared it and sowed it, and without a frost they will gather 30 to 35 sacks of corn. The said Sieur de Repentigny so much feels it his duty to devote himself to the cultivation of these lands that he has already entered into a bargain for two slaves^ whom he will employ to take care of the corn~ that he will gather upon these lands." The Tkadees' Struggle to Retain their Trade. While they had been securing the trade of the far North- west and the Illinois country, the French had allowed the English to gain the trade of the upper Ohio,^ and were now brought face to face with the danger of losing the entire Northwest, and thus the connection of Canada and Louisiana. The commandants of the western posts were financially as well as patriotically interested. In 1754, Green Bay, then garrisoned by an officer, a sergeant and four soldiers, re- quired for the Indian trade of its department thirteen canoes of goods annually, costing about 7000 livres each, making a 'Indians. Compare Wis. Hist. Colls., III., 256; VII., 158, 117, 179. ' The French minister for the colonies expressing approval of this post, writes in 1753 : "As it can hardly be expected that any other grain than corn will grow there, it is necessary at least for a while to stick to it, and not to persevere stubbornly in trying to raise wheat." On this Dr. E. D. Neill comments : " Millions of bushels of wheat from the region west and north of Lake Superior pass every year .... through the ship canal at Sault Ste. Marie." The corn was for supplying the voyageurs. ^Margry, VI., 758. 581] The Traders'' Struggle to retain their Trade. 41 total of nearly $18,000.' Bougainville asserts that Marin, the commandant of the department of the Bay, was associated in trade with the governor and intendant, and that his part netted him annually 15,000 francs. When it became necessary for the French to open hostili- ties with the English traders in the Ohio country, it was the Wisconsin trader, Charles de Langlade, with his Chippeway Indians, who in 1752 fell upon the English trading post at Pickawillany and destroyed the center of English trade in the Ohio region.~ The leaders in the opening of the war that ensued were Northwestern traders. St. Pierre, who com- manded at Fort Le Bceuf when Washington appeared with his demands from the Governor of Virginia that the French should evacuate the Ohio country, had formerly been the trader in command at Lake Pepin on the upper Mississippi.^ Coulon de Villiers, who captured Washington at Fort Necessity, was the son of the former commandant at Green Bay.* Beaujeau, who led the French troops to the defeat of Braddcck, had been an officer in the Fox wars.^ It was Charles de Langlade who commanded the Indians and was chiefly responsible for the success of the ambuscade." Wisconsin Indians, representing almost all the tribes, took part with the French in the war.' Traders passed to and from their business to the battlefields of the East. For example, De Repentigny, whose post at Sault Ste. ^larie has been described, wasatMichillimackinaciu January, 1755, took part in the battle of Lake George in the fall of that year, * Canadian Archives, 1886, clxxii. *Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe. I., 84. ' Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 433. Washington was guided to the fort along an old trading route by traders ; the trail was improved by the Ohio Com- pany, and was used by Braddock in his march (Sparks, Washington's Works, II., 302). ^Wis. Hist. Colls., v., 117. ^Ibid., 115. *Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, II., 425-6. He was prominently engaged in other battles ; see Wis. Hist. Colls., VII., 123-187. ^Wis. Hist. Colls., v., 117. 42 Thpj Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [582 formed a partnership to continue the trade with a trader of Michillimackinac in 1756, was at that place in 1758, and in 1759 fought with Montcalm on the heights of Abraham.^ It was not without a struggle that the traders yielded their beaver country. The English and the Noethwest. Influence of the Indian Trade on Diplomacy. In the meantime what was the attitude of the English toward the Northwest? In 1720 Governor Spotswood of Virginia wrote r "The danger which threatens these, his Maj'ty's Plantations, from this new Settlement is also very considerable, for by the communication which the French may maintain between Canada and Mississippi by the con- veniency of the Lakes, they do in a manner surround all the British Plantations. They have it in their power by these Lakes and the many Rivers running into them and into the Mississippi to engross all the Trade of the Indian Nations w'ch are now supplied from hence." Cadwallader Golden, Surveyor-General of New York, says in 1721: "New France (as the French now claim) extends from the mouth of the Mississippi to the mouth of the River St. Lawrence, by which the French plainly shew their inten- tion of enclosing the British Settlements and cutting us off from all Commerce with the numerous Nations of Indians that are everywhere settled over the vast continent of North America.'" As time passed, as population increased, and as the reports of the traders extolled the fertility of the country, both the English and the French, but particularly the Ameri- cans, began to consider it from the standpoint of coloniza- 'Neill, in Mag. West. Hist., VII., 17, and Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 434- 436. For other examples see Wis. Hist. Colls., V., 113-118 ; Minn. Hist. Colls., v., 430-1. «Va. Hist. Colls., N. S., II., 329. ^N. Y. Col. Docs., v., 726. 683] The English and the Northwest. 43 tion as well as from that of the fur trade.' The Ohio Company had both settlement and the fur trade in mind,' and the French Governor, Galissoniere, at the same period urged that France ought to plant a colony in the Ohio region.'' After the conquest of New France by England there was still the question whether she should keep Canada and the North- west.'* Franklin, urging her to do so, offered as one argu- ment the value of the fur trade, intrinsically and as a means of holding the Indians in check. Discussing the question whether the interior regions of America would ever be accessible to English settlement and so to English manufac- tures, he pointed out the vastness of our river and lake system, and the fact that Indian trade already permeated the interior. In interesting comparison he called their attention to the fact that English commerce reached along river sys- tems into the remote parts of Europe, and that in ancient times the Levant had carried on a trade with the distant interior.'^ That the value of the fur trade was an important element in inducing the English to retain Canada is shown by the fact that Great Britain no sooner came into the possession of the country than she availed herself of the fields for which she had so long intrigued. Among the western posts she occu- pied Green Bay, and with the garrison came traders ; '' but the fort was abandoned on the outbreak of Pontiac's war." This war was due to the revolt of the Indians of the North- west against the transfer of authority, and was fostered by ' Indian relations had a noteworthy influence upon colonial union ; see Lucas, Appendiculae Historicae, 161, and Frothingham, Rise of the Republic, ch. iv. • Piirkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 59 ; Sparks, Washington's Works, II., 302. •''Parkraan, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., 21. *Ibid. 11., 403. • Bigelow. Franklin's Works, III., 43, 83, 98-100. *Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 26-38. ' Parkman, Pontiac, I., 185. Consult N. Y. Col. Does,, VI., 635, 690, 788, 872. 974. 44 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [584 the French traders.^ It concerned Wisconsin but slightly, and at its close we find Green Bay a little trading community along the Fox, where a few families lived comfortably' under the quasi -patriarchal rule of Langlade.^' In 1765 trade was re-established at Chequamegon Bay by an English trader named Henry, and here he found the Chippeways dressed in deerskins, the wars having deprived them of a trader.^ As early as 1766 some Scotch merchants more extensively reopened the fur trade, using MichiUimackinac as the basis of their operations and employing French voyageurs." By the proclamation of the King in 1763 the Northwest was left without political organization, it being reserved as crown lands and exempt from purchase or settlement, the design being to give up to the Indian trade all the lands " westward of the sources of the rivers which fall into the sea from the West and Northwest as aforesaid." In a report of the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in 1772 we find the attitude of the English government clearly set forth in these words -^ " The great object of colonization upon the continent of North America has been to improve and extend the com- merce and manufactures of this kingdom ... It does appear to us that the extension of the fur trade depends entirely upon the Indians being undisturbed in the posses- sion of their hunting grounds, and that all colonization does in its nature and must in its consequence operate to the preju- dice of that branch of commerce . . . Let the savages enjoy their deserts in quiet. Were they driven from their forests the peltry trade would decrease," In a word, the English government attempted to adopt the 'Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 26. ' Carver, Travels. 3Porlier Papers, Wis. Pur Trade MSS., in possession of Wis. Hist. Sec; also Wis. Hist. Colls., III., 200-201. * Henry, Travels. 'Canadian Archives, 1888, p. 61 fE. •Sparks, Franklin's Works, IV., 303-323. 585] The English and the Northwest. 45 western policy of the French. From one point of view it was a successful policy. The French traders took service under the English, and in the Revolutionary war Charles de Langlade led the Wisconsin Indians to the aid of Hamilton against George Rogers Clark/ as he had before against the British, and in the War of 1812 the British trader Robert Dickson repeated this movement.^ As in the days of Begon, " the savages took the part of those with whom they traded." The secret proposition of Vergennes, in the negotiations pre- ceding the treaty of 1783, to limit the United States by the Alle- ghanies and to give the Northwest to England, while reserving the rest of the region between the mountains and the Missis- sippi as Indian territory under Spanish protection,^ would have given the fur trade to these nations.* In the extensive discus- sions over the diplomacy whereby the Northwest was included within the limits of the United States, it has been asserted that we won our case by the chartered claims of the colonies and by George Rogers Clark's conquest of the Illinois country. It appears, however, that in fact Franklin, who had been a prominent member and champion of the Ohio Company, and who knew the West from personal acquaintance, had persuaded Shelburne to cede it to us as a part of a liberal peace that should effect a reconciliation between the two coun- tries. Shelburne himself looked upon the region from the point of view of the fur trade simply, and was more willing to make this concession than he was some others. In the discussion over the treaty in Parliament in 1783, the North- western boundary was treated almost solely from the point of view of the fur trade and of the desertion of the Indians. The question was one of profit and loss in this 'Wis. Hist. Colls., XL ^Jbid. 3 Jay, Address before the N. Y. Hist. See. on the Treaty Negotiations of 1782-3, appendix ; map in Narr. and Crit. Hist. Amer., VII., 148. * But Vergennes had a just appreciation of the value of the region for settlement as well. He recognized and feared the American capacity for expansion. 46 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [586 traffic. One member attacked Shelburne on the ground that, "not thinking the naked independence a sufficient proof of his liberality to the United States, he had clothed it with the warm covering of our fur trade." Shelburne defended his cession " on the fair rule of the value of the district ceded,"^ and comparing exports and imports and the cost of administration, he concluded that the fur trade of the North- west was not of sufficient value to warrant continuing the war. The most valuable trade, he argued, was north of the line, and the treaty merely applied sound economic princi- ples and gave America " a share in the trade." The reten- tion of her Northwestern posts by Great Britain at the close of the war, in contravention of the treaty, has an obvious relation to the fur trade. In his negotiations with Hammond, the British ambassador in 1791, Secretary of State Jefferson said : " By these proceedings we have been intercepted entirely from the commerce of furs with the Indian nations to the northward — a commerce which had ever been of great importance to the United States, not only for its intrinsic value, but as it was the means of cherishing peace with these Indians, and of superseding the necessity of that expensive warfare which we have been obliged to carry on with them during the time that these posts have been in other hands. ""^ In discussing the evacuation of the posts in 1794 Jay was met by a demand that complete freedom of the Northwestern Indian trade should be granted to British subjects. It was furthermore proposed by Lord Grenville^ that, " Whereas it is now understood that the river Mississippi would at no point thereof be intersected by such westward line as is described in the said treaty [1783] ; and whereas it was stipulated in the said treaty that the navigation of the Mississippi should be free to both parties " — one of two new 1 Hansard, XXIIL, 377-8, 381-3, 389, 398-9, 405, 409-10, 423, 450, 457, 465. 'American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I., 190. 3 Ibid. 487. 587] The English and the Northwest. 47 propositions should be accepted regarding the northwestern boundary. The maps in American State Papers, Foreign Relations, I., 492, show that both these proposals extended Great Britain's territory so as to embrace the Grand Portage and the lake region of northern Minnesota, one of the best .of the Northwest Company's fur-trading regions south of the line, and in connection by the Red river with the Cana- dian river systems.^ They were rejected by Jay. Secretary Randolph urged him to hasten the removal of the British, stating that the delay asked for, to allow the traders to collect their Indian debts, etc., would have a bad effect upon the Indians, and protesting that free communication for the British would strike deep into our Indian trade.' The definitive treaty included the following provisions:^ The posts were to be evacuated before June 1, 1796. " All settlers and traders, within the precincts or jurisdiction of the said posts, shall continue to enjoy, unmolested, all their property of every kind, and shall be protected therein. They shall be at full liberty to remain there, or to remove with all or any part of their effects ; and it shall also be free to them to sell their lands, houses, or effects, or to retain the property thereof, at their discretion ; such of them as shall continue to reside within the said boundary lines shall not be compelled to become citizens of the United States, or to take any oath of allegiance to the government thereof; but they shall be at full liberty to do so if they think proper, and they shall make and declare their election within one year after the evacuation aforesaid. And all persons who shall con- tinue there after the expiration of the said year without ' As early as 1794 the company had established a stockaded fort at Sandy lake. After Jay's treaty conceding freedom of entry, the company dotted this region with posts and raised the British flag over them. In 1805 the center of trade was changed from Grand Portage to Fort William Henry, on the Canada side. Neill, Minnesota, 239 (4th edn.). Bancroft, Northwest Coast, I., 560. Vide anle, p. 20, &nd post, p. 55. ' Amer. State Papers, For. llels., I., p. 509. * Treaties and Conventions, etc., 1776-1887, p. 380. 48 The Indian Trade, in Wisconsin. [588 having declared their intention of remaining subjects of his British Majesty shall be considered as having elected to become citizens of the United States." " It is agreed that it shall at all times be free to His Majesty's subjects, and to the Indians dwelling on either side of the said boundary line, freely to pass and repass by land or inland navigation . into the respective territories and countries of the two parties on the continent of America (the country within the limits of the Hudson's Bay Company only excepted), and to navigate all the lakes, rivers and waters thereof, and freely to carry on trade and commerce with each other." In his elaborate defence of Jay's treaty, Alexander Hamil- ton paid much attention to the question of the fur trade. Defending Jay for permitting so long a delay in evacuation and for granting right of entry into our fields, he minimized the value of the trade. So far from being worth $800,000 annually, he asserted the trade within our limits would not be M'orth $100,000, seven-eighths of the traffic being north of the line. This estimate of the value of the northwestern trade was too low. In the course of his paper he made this observation :^ " In proportion as the article is viewed on an enlarged plan and permanent scale, its importance to us magnifies. Who can say how far British colonization may spread south- ward and down the west side of the Mississippi, northward and westward into the vast interior regions towards the Pacific ocean ? .... In this large view of the subject, the fur trade, which has made a very prominent figure in the discussion, becomes a point scarcely visible. Objects of great variety and magnitude start up in perspective, eclipsing the little atoms of the day, and promising to grow and mature with time." Such was not the attitude of Great Britain. To her the Northwest was desirable on account of its Indian commerce. By a statement of the Province of Upper Canada, sent with ' Lodge, Hamilton's Works, IV., 514. 589] T1ie Em/Ush and the Northtcest. 49 the approbation of Lieutenant-General Hunter to the Duke of Kent, Commander-in-Chief of British North America, in the year 1800, we are enabled to see the situation through Canadian eyes : ^ " The Indians, who had loudly and Justly complained of a treaty [1783] in which they were sacrificed by a cession of their country contrary to repeated promises, were with diffi- culty appeased, however finding the Posts retained and some Assurances given they ceased to murmur and resolved to defend their country extending from the Ohio Northward to the Great Lakes and westward to the Mississippi, an immense tract, in which they found the deer, the bear, the wild wolf, game of all sorts in profusion. They employed the Tomahawk and Scalping Knife against such deluded settlers who on the faith of the treaty to which they did not consent, ventured to cross the Ohio, secretly encouraged by the Agents of Gov- ernment, supplied with Arms, Ammunition, and provisions they maintained an obstinate & destructive war against the States, cut off two Corps sent against them The American Government, discouraged by these disasters were desirous of ])eace on any terms, their deputies were sent to Detroit, they offered to confine their Pretensions within cer- tain limits far South of the Lakes, if this offer had been accepted the Indian Country would have been for ages an impassible Barrier between us. twas unfortunately perhaps wantonly rejected, and the war continued." Acting under the privileges accorded to them by Jay's treaty, the British traders were in almost as complete posses- sion of Wisconsin until after the war of 1812 as if Great Britain still owned it. AVhen the war broke out the keys of the region, Detroit and Michillimackinac, fell into the British hands. Green Bay and Prairie du Chien were settlements of French-British traders and voyageurs. Their leader was Robert Dickson, who had traded at the latter settlement. Writing in 1814 from his camp at Winnebago 1 Michigan Pioneer Colls., XV., 8 ; cf. 10, 13, 33, and XVI., 67. 60 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [590 Lake, he says : " I think that Bony [Bonaparte] must be knocked up as all Europe are now in Arms. The crisis is not far oif when I trust in God that the Tyrant will be humbled, & the Scoundrel American Democrats be obliged to go down on their knees to Britain."^ Under him most of the Wisconsin traders of importance re- ceived British commissions. In the spring of 1814 the Americans took Prairie du Chien, at the mouth of the Wis- consin river, whereupon Col. M'Douall, the British com- mandant at Michillimackinac, wrote to General Drummond :' . . . " I saw at once the imperious necessity which existed of endeavoring by every means to dislodge the American Genl from his new conquest, and make him relinquish the immense tract of country he had seized upon in consequence & which brought him into the very heart of that occupied by our Jfriendly Indians, There was no alternative it must either be done or there was an end to our connection with the Indians for if allowed to settle themselves by dint of threats bribes & sowing divisions among them, tribe after tribe would be gained over or subdued, & thus would be destroyed the only barrier which protects the great trading establishments of the North West and the Hudson's Bay Companys. Nothing could then prevent the enemy from gaining the source of the Mississippi, gradually extending themselves by the Red river to Lake Winnipic, from Avhense the descent of Nelsons river to York Fort would in time be easy." The British traders, voyageurs and Indians^ dislodged the Americans, and at the close of the war England was practi- cally in possession of the Indian country of the Nortliwest. In the negotiations at Ghent the British commissioners asserted the sovereignty of the Indians over their lands, and their independence in relation to the United States, and 1 Wis. Fur Trade M3S., 1814 (State Hist. Soc). 2 Wis. Hist. Colls., XL, 360. Mich. Pioneer Colls., XVI., 103-104. »Wis. Hist. Colls., XL, 255. Cf. Mich. Pioneer Colls., XVI., 67. Eolette, one of the Prairie du Chien traders, was tried by the British for treason to Great Britain. 591] The Northwest Company. 51 demanded that a barrier of Indian territory should be estab- lished between the two countries, free to the traffic of both nations but not open to purchase by either.^ The line of the Grenville treaty was suggested as a basis for determining this Indian region. The proposition would have removed from the sovereignty of the United States the territory of the Northwest with the exception of about two-thirds of Ohio,^ and given it over to the British fur traders. The Americans declined to grant the terms, and the United States was finally left in possession of the Northwest. The Northwest Company. The most striking feature of the English period was the Northwest Company.^ From a study of it one may learn the character of the English occupation of the Northwest.* It was formed in 1783 and fully organized in 1787, with the design of contesting the field with the Hudson Bay Company. Goods were brought from England to Montreal, the head- quarters of the company, and thence from the four emporiums, Detroit, Mackinaw, Sault Ste. Marie, and Grand Portage, they were scattered through the great Northwest, even to the Pacific ocean. Toward the end of the eighteenth century ships ® began to take part in this commerce ; a portion of the goods was sent ' Amer. State Papers, For. Rels., III., 705. * Amer. State Papers, Ind. Affs., I., 562. See map in Collot's Travels, atlas. ^On this company see Mackenzie, Voyages; Bancroft, Northwest Coast, I., 378-616, and citations; Htmi's March. Mag., III., 185; Irving, Astoria; Ross, The Fur Hunters of the Far West; Harmon, Journal ; Report on the Canadian Archives, 1881, p. 61 et seq. This fur-trading life still goes on in the more remote regions of British America. See Robinson, Great Fur Land, ch. xv. *Wis. Hist. Colls., XL, 123-5. * Mackenzie, Voyages, xxxix. Harmon, Journal, 36. In the fall of 1784, Haldimand granted permission to the Northwest Company to build a small vessel at Detroit, to be employed next year on Lake Superior. Calendar of Canadian Archives, 1888, p, 72. 52 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [592 from Montreal in boats to Kingston, thence in vessels to Niagara, thence overland to Lake Erie, to be reshipped in vessels to Mackinaw and to Sault Ste. Marie, where another transfer was made to a Lake Superior vessel. These ships were of about ninety -five tons burden and made four or five trips a season. But in the year 1800 the primitive mode of trade was not materially changed. From the traffic along the main artery of commerce between Grand Portage and Montreal may be learned the kind of trade that flowed along such branches as that between the island of Mackinaw and the Wisconsin posts. The visitor at La Chine rapids, near Montreal, might have seen a squadron of Northwestern trad- ing canoes leaving for the Grand Portage, at the west of Lake Superior.^ The boatmen, or "engages," having spent their season's gains in carousal, packed their blanket capotes and were ready for the wilderness again. They made a picturesque crew in their gaudy turbans, or hats adorned with plumes and tinsel, their brilliant handkerchiefs tied sailor -fashion about swarthy necks, their calico shirts, and their flaming worsted belts, which served to hold the knife and the tobacco pouch. Rough trousers, leggings, and cowhide shoes or gaily-worked moccasins completed the costume. The trad- ing birch canoe measured forty feet in length, with a depth of three and a width of five. It floated four tons of freight, and yet could be carried by four men over difficult portages. Its crew of eight men was engaged at a salary '~ of from five to ' Besides the authorities cited above, see "Anderson's Narrative," in Wis. Hist. Colls., IX., 137-206. * An estimate of the cost of an expedition in 1717 is given in Margry, VI. , 506. At that time the wages of a good voyageur for a year amounted to about $50. Provisions for the two months' trip from Montreal to Mackinaw cost about .^1.00 per month per man. Indian corn for a year cost $16 ; lard, $10 ; eau de vie, $1.30 ; tobacco, 25 cents. It cost, there- fore, less than $80 to support a voyageur for one year's trip into the woods. Gov. Ninian Edwards, writing at the time of the American Fur Company {post, p. 57), says: " The whole expense of transporting eight thousand weight of goods from Montreal to the Mississippi, wintering with the 593] The Northwest Company. 53 eight hundred livres, about $100 to $160 per annum, each, with a yearly outfit of coarse clothing and a daily food allow- ance of a quart of hulled corn, or peas, seasoned wdth two ounces of tallow. The experienced voyageurs who spent the winters in the woods were called hivernaiis, or winterers, or sometimes hoiiimes du nord; while the inexperienced, those who simply made the trip from Montreal to the outlying depots and return, were contemptuously dubbed mangeurs de lard,^ Indians, and returning with a load of furs and peltries in the succeeding season, including the cost of provisions and portages and the hire of five engages for the whole time does not exceed five hundred and twenty-five dollars, much of which is usually paid to those engages when in the Indian country, in goods at an exorbitant price." American State Papers, VI., 65. 'This distinction goes back at least to 1681 (N. Y. Col. Docs., IX., 152). Often the engagement was for five years, and the voyageur might be transferred from one master to another, at the master's will. The following is a translation of a typical printed engagement, one of scores in the possession of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the written portions in brackets : " Before a Notary residing at the post of Michilimakinac, Undersigned ; Was Present [Joseph Lamarqueritte] who has voluntarily engaged and doth bind himself by these Presents to M[onsieur Louis Grignion] here present and accepting, at [his] first requisilion to set ofE from this Post [in the capacity of Winterer] in one of [his] Canoes or Bateaux to make the Voyage [going as well as returning] and to winter for [two years at the Bay]. " And to have due and fitting care on the route and while at the said [place] of the Merchandise, Provisions, Peltries, Utensils and of every- thing necessary for the Voyage ; to serve, obey and execute faithfully all that the said Sieur [Bourgeois] or any other person representing him to whom he may transport the present Engagement, commands him law- fully and honestly ; to do [his] profit, to avoid anything to his damage, and to inform him of it if it come to his knowledge, and generally to do all that a good [Winterer] ought and is obliged to do ; without power to make any particular trade, to absent himself, or to quit the said service, under pain of these Ordinances, and of loss of wages. This engagement is therefore made, for the sum of [Eight Hundred] livres or shillings, ancient currency of Quebec, that he promises [and] binds himself to deliver and pay to the said [Winterer one month] after his return to this Post, and at his departure [an Equipment each year of 2 Shirts, 1 Blanket 54 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [594 " pork -eaters," because their pampered appetites demanded peas and pork rather than hulled corn and tallow. Two of the crew, one at the bow and the other at the stern, being especially skilled in the craft of handling the paddle in the rapids, received higher wages than the rest. Into the canoe was first placed the heavy freight, shot, axes, powder ; next the dry goods, and, crowning all, filling the canoe to over- flowing, came the provisions — pork, peas or corn, and sea biscuits, sewed in canvas sacks. The lading completed, the voyageur hung his votive offer- ings in the chapel of Saint Anne, patron saint of voyageurs, the paddles struck the waters of the St. Lawrence, and the fleet of canoes glided away on its six weeks' journey to Grand Portage. There was the Ottawa to be ascended, the rapids to be run, the portages where the canoe must be emptied and where each voyageur must bear his two packs of ninety pounds apiece, and there were the decharges, where the canoe was merely lightened and where the voyageurs, now on the land, now into the rushing waters, dragged it forward till the rapids were passed. There was no stopping to dry, but on, until the time for the hasty meal, or the evening camp- fire underneath the pines. Every two miles there was a stop for a three minutes' smoke, or " pipe," and when a portage was made it was reckoned in " pauses," by which is meant of 3 point, 1 Carot of Tobacco, 1 Cloth Blanket, 1 Leather Shirt, 1 Pair of Leather Breeches, 5 Pairs of Leather Shoes, and Six Pounds of Soap.] " For thus, etc., promising, etc., binding, etc., renouncing, etc. " Done and passed at the said [Michilimaekinac] in the year eighteen hundred [Seven] the [twenty-fourth] of [July before] twelve o'clock ; & have signed with the exception of the said [Winterer] who, having declared himself unable to do so, has made his ordinary mark after the engagement was read to him. his "Joseph X Lamarqueritte. [seal] mark. " Sami-. Abbott, Louis Grignon. [seal] Not. Pub." Endorsed—" Engagement of Joseph Lamarqueritte to Louis Grignon." 595] The Northwest Company. 55 the number of times the men must stop to rest. Whenever a burial cross appeared, or a stream was left or entered, the voyageurs removed their hats, and made the sign of the cross while one of their number said a short prayer; and again the paddles beat time to some rollicking song.^ Dans mon chemin, j'ai rencontre Trois cavaliures, bien montees ; L'on, Ion, laridon daine, Lon, ton, laridon dai. Trois cavalieres, bien raont^es, L'un a cheval, et I'autre a pied; L'on, lon, laridon daine, Lon, ton, laridon dai. Arrived at Sault Ste. Marie, the fleet was often doubled by newcomers, so that sometimes sixty canoes swept their way along the north shore, the paddles marking sixty strokes a minute, while the rocks gave back the echoes of Canadian songs rolling out from five hundred lusty throats. And so they drew up at Grand Portage, near the present northeast boundary of Minnesota, now a sleepy, squalid little village, but then the general rendezvous where sometimes over a thousand men met ; for, at this time, the company had fifty clerks, seventy interpreters, eighteen hundred and twenty canoe-men, and thirty -five guides. It sent annually to Montreal 106,000 beaver-skins, to say nothing of other pel- tries. When the proprietors from ]\Iontreal met the pro- prietors from the northern posts, and with their clerks gathered at the banquet in their large log hall to the number of a hundred, the walls hung with spoils of the chase, the rough tables furnished with abundance of venison, fish, bread, salt pork, butter, peas, corn, potatoes, tea, milk, wine and eau de vie, while, outside, the motley crowd of engages feasted on hulled corn and melted fat — was it not a truly ^Por Canadian boat-songs see HtmVs Merch. Mag., IIL, 189; Mrs. Kinzie, Wau Bun ; Bela Hubbard, Memorials of a Half-Century ; Rob- inson, Great Fur Land. 56 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. [596 baronial sceue ? Clerks and engages of this company, or its rival, the Hudson Bay Company, might winter one season in Wisconsin and the next in the remote north. For example, Amable Grignon, a Green Bay trader, wintered in 1818 at Lac qui Parle in Minnesota, the next year at Lake Atha- basca, and the third in the hyperborean regions of Great Slave Lake. In his engagement he figures as Amable Grig- non, of the Parish of Green Bay, Upper Canada, and he receives $400 " and found in tobacco and shoes and tw^o doges," besides " the usual equipment given to clerks." He afterwards returned to a post on the Wisconsin river. The attitude of Wisconsin traders toward the Canadian authorities and the Northwestern wilds is clearly shown in this docu- ment, which brings into a line Upper Canada, " the parish of Green Bay," and the Hudson Bay Company's territories about Great Slave Lake ! ^ How widespread and how strong was the influence of these traders upon the savages may be easily imagined, and this commercial control was strengthened by the annual presents made to the Indians by the British at their posts. At a time when our relations with Great Britain were growing strained, such a power in the Northwest was a serious menace.' In 1809 John Jacob Astor secured a charter from the State of New York, incorporating the American Fur Company. He proposed to consolidate the fur trade of the United States, plant an establishment in the contested Oregon territory, and link it with Michillimackinac (Mackinaw island) by way of the Missouri through a series of trading posts. In 1810 two expeditions of his Pacific Fur Company set out for the Columbia, the one around Cape Horn and the other by way ^ Wis. Fur Trade MSS. (Wis. Hist. Soc). Published in Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the State Hist. Soc. of Wis. 1889, pp. 81-83. «See Mich. Pioneer Colls., XV., XVI., 67, 74. The government con- sulted the Northwest Company, who made particular efforts to "prevent the Americans from ever alienating the minds of the Indians." To this end they drew up memoirs regarding the proper frontiers. 597] ' American Influences. 57 of Green bay and the Missouri. In 1811 he bought a half interest in the INIuckinaw Company, a rival of the Northwest Company and the one that had especial power in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and this new organization he called the Southwest Company. But the war of 1812 came; xlstoria, the Pacific post, fell into the hands of the Northwest Com- pany, while the Southwest Company's trade was ruined. American Influences. Although the Green Bay court of justice, such as it was, had been administered under American commissions since 1803, when Reaume dispensed a rude equity under a com- mission of Justice of the Peace from Governor Harrison,' neither Green Bay nor the rest of Wisconsin had any proper appreciation of its American connections until the close of this war. But now^ occurred these significant events : 1. Astor's company was reorganized as the American Fur Company, with headquarters at Mackinaw island.' 2. The United States enacted in 1816 that neither foreign fur traders, nor capital for that trade, should be admitted to this country.^ This was designed to terminate English influence among the tribes, and it fostered Astor's company. The law was so interpreted as not to exclude British (that is generally, French) interpreters and boatmen, who were essen- tial to the company ; but this interpretation enabled British subjects to evade the law and trade on their own account by having their invoices made out to some Yankee clerk, while they accompanied the clerk in the guise of inter- ^ Reanme's petition in Wis. Fur Trade MSS. in possession of Wisconsin Historical Society. -On this company consult Irving, Astoria; Bancroft, Northwest Coast, I., ch. xvi. ; II., chs. vii-x ; Mag. Amer. Hist. XIII., 209; Fran- chere, Narrative ; Ross, Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon, or Cohimbia River (1849) ; Wis. Fur Trade ]MSS. (State Hist. Soc). 3 U. S. Statutes at Large, III., 333. Cf. laws in 1802 and 1833. 58 The Indian Trade in Wisconsin. ■ [598 preters.^ In this way a number of Yankees came to the State. 3. In the year 1816 United States garrisons were sent to Green Bay and Prairie dii Chien.^ 4. In 1814 the United States provided for locating govern- ment trading posts at these two places. Government Trading Houses. The system of public trading houses goes back to colonial days. At first in Plymouth and Jamestown all industry was controlled by the commonwealth, and in Massachusetts Bay the stock company had reserved the trade in furs for them- selves before leaving England.^ The trade was frequently farmed out, but public "truck houses" were established by the latter colony as early as 1694-5.^ Franklin, in his pub- lic dealings with the Ohio Indians, saw the importance of regulation of the trade, and in 1753 he wrote asking James Bowdoin of jMassachusetts to procure him a copy of the truckhouse law of that colony, saying that if it had proved to work well he thought of proposing it for Pennsylvania.'' The reply of Bowdoin showed that Massachusetts furnished goods to the Indians at wholesale prices and so drove out the French and the private traders. In 1757 Virginia •Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 103 ; Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 9. The Warren brothers, who came to Wisconsin in 1818, were descendants of the Pil- grims and related to Joseph Warren who fell at Bunker Hill ; they came from Berkshire, Mass., and marrying the half-breed daughters of Michael Cadotte, of La Pointe, succeeded to his trade. -See the objections of British traders, Mich. Pioneer Colls., XVI., 76 ff. The Northwest Company tried to induce the British government to construe the treaty so as to prevent the United States from erecting the forts, urging that a fort at Prairie du Chieu would " deprive the Indians of their ' rights and privileges '", guai-anteed by the treaty. 3 Mass. Coll. Rees., I.. 55 ; III., 424. *Acts and Resolves of the Prov. of Mass. Bay, I., 172. * Bigelow, Franklin's W